Mozart has the classic purity of light and the blue ocean; Beethoven the romantic grandeur which belongs to the storms of air and ...sea, and while the soul of Mozart seems to dwell on the ethereal peaks of Olympus, that of Beethoven climbs shuddering the storm-beaten sides of a Sinai. Blessed be they both! Each represents a moment of the ideal life, each does us good. Our love is due to both.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A faithful lover is a character greatly out of date, and rarely now used but to adorn some romantic novel, or for a flourish on th...e stage. He passes now for a man of little merit, or one who knows nothing of the world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In general a thing is romantic when, as Aristotle would say, it is wonderful rather than probable; in other words, when it violate...s the normal sequence of cause and effect in favor of adventure. Here is the fundamental contrast between the words classic and romantic which meets us at the outset and in some form or other persists in all uses of the word down to the present day. A thing is romantic when it is strange, unexpected, intense, superlative, extreme, unique, etc. A thing is classical, on the other hand, when it is not unique, but representative of a class. In this sense, medical men may speak correctly of a classic case of typhoid fever, or a classic case of hysteria. One is even justified in speaking of a classic example of romanticism. By an easy extension of meaning a thing is classical when it belongs to a high class or to the best class.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The most passionate, consistent, extreme and implacable enemy of the Enlightenment and ... all forms of rationalism ... was Johann... Georg Hamann. His influence, direct and indirect, upon the romantic revolt against universalism and scientific method ... was considerable and perhaps crucial.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I ... walked to the Abbey of Holyroodhouse once to the Palace itself, once to the crown of Scotland above the gate in front, and o...nce to the venerable old Chapel. I next stood in the court before the Palace, and bowed thrice to Arthur Seat, that lofty romantic mountain on which I have so often strayed in my days of youth and felt the raptures of a soul filled with ideas of the magnificence of God and his creation. Having thus gratified my agreeable whim and superstitious humour, I felt a warm glow of satisfaction.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As a novelist, I cannot occupy myself with "characters," or at any rate central ones, who lack panache, in one or another sense, w...ho would be incapable of a major action or a major passion, or who have not a touch of the ambiguity, the ultimate unaccountability, the enlarging mistiness of persons "in history." History, as more austerely I now know it, is not romantic. But I am.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The importance of a lost romantic vision should not be underestimated. In such a vision is power as well as joy. In it is meaning.... Life is flat, barren, zestless, if one can find one's lost vision nowhere.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A requirement of femininity is that a woman devote her life to love--to mother love, to romantic love, to religious love, to amorp...hous, undifferentiated caring. The territory of the heart is admittedly a province that is open to all, but women alone are expected to make an obsessional career of its exploration, to find whatever adventure, power, fulfillment or tragedy life has to offer within its bounds. There is no question that a woman is apt to feel more feminine, more confident of her interior gender makeup, when she is reliably within some stage of love--even the girlish crush or the stage of unrequited love or a broken heart. Men have suffered for love, and men have accomplished great feats in the name of love, but what man has ever felt at the top of his masculine form when he is lovesick or suffering from heartache?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When young people are too rigidly sequestered from [the world], their lively and romantic imaginations paint it to them as a parad...ise of which they have been beguiled; but when they are shown it properly, and in due time, they see it such as it really is, equally shared by pain and pleasure, hope and disappointment.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »